


Endless Forms Most Beautiful

by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)



Category: Fringe (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multiple Timelines, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, etta is a good bean, first foray into fringe fic, i met a fic that made me sad so i decided to fix it, i will gently shrug at the archive warnings that canon did not provide you, no editing we die in an alternate timeline, no kids will be un-existed in my fics, season 5 is canon but alt timelines
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2020-11-24 03:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20900687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: "Everything is fixed!" really doesn't give many details. Often there is something between the broken and the fixing. In some cases, that something is a little girl and her parents. How the universe fixes this one should be interesting...





	1. Days String Together a Life

**Author's Note:**

> Someone pointed out to me a logical end of season 5 of Fringe and my immediate reaction was a resounding nope and some fix-it fic. idek if anyone's in this fandom anymore but hey here we go

Each birth contains its own death.

It's not macabre, or nihilist, it's simply what is. Olivia knows this. From the first time (every first time) she put her hands on a gun, her finger on a trigger, her sights on the end, she's known this. When you learn to shoot, you are always learning and unlearning. The monsters at the end of the bullet. The people at the end of the barrel. The in-betweens. But nothing was ever as monstrous as people can be, in the end.

Every birth contains the seeds of its own destruction and she wonders just what seeds are being planted here, with Henrietta. It's Peter who suggests her name and she thinks of an ordinary man a universe away and says yes. There are the practical concerns, of course, of Cortexiphan and other assorted traumas shared in the blood but those don't seem to extend to her ten fingers and ten toes and faintest wisp of curly blonde hair and what can she do but wonder at this miracle that's been landed in her only-too-human hands?

Peter, bless him, is so good about this, taking two-in-the-morning feedings with the easy insouciance he's carried through everything. "Sleep," he says. "’Consultant’ means I don't have to show up ‘til they need me."

Despite everything, somehow life goes on. Etta learns to smile, squirm, roll, stand, speak--and it's here Olivia thinks her heart stops because this tiny, oh-so-fragile life is smiling up at her with her husband's eyes and calling her and she can't live up to the seemingly impossible standard of 'Mama'. 

She doesn't say anything to Peter, of course. He loves her to the edges of reason and she loves him to the ends of all the universes but the difference is... the difference is that he believes in her. So feeling like there may be something she cannot do when he's there believing that she can do anything would feel like a betrayal--and they have had more than enough of those in their lives. 

So Olivia holds on to these threads of a life and a home with everything she's got. 

She feels it like the shiver of a train miles underground, the sort you're not supposed to be able to even intuit, but it's there. Something about the way the dandelion fluff catches the sun, the way the very edge of her daughter's laugh recalls the siren somewhere in the background. Normal, nothing to worry about... except… 

The book, the blanket, the carseat, the house, the usual bathtime battle, solved when Mama promises to not pull her curls when washing her hair. Then dinner and dancing to an old record played and then too many iterations of a story Olivia's read too many times to remember and then, finally, finally, stillness.

She sinks onto a chair at the breakfast bar and silently looks her thanks at Peter when he hands her the wine and only then catches the look in his eyes. "What is it?" She asks softly.

That laugh, the shake of his head as he looks down. “It’s nothing,” he says, like he always does, so of course she knows that it’s something.

She doesn’t even have to voice the question anymore for him to relent. He shakes his head again, holds up the scrap of paper, smiles that half-grin. “Walter, being himself, as always.”

It’s a paper just the sort of size to fit into a standard envelope without folding: four black lines on white paper, the sort you can make with any sharpie or stylus or stick in mud. A white tulip. 

Olivia takes it hesitantly. It’s not that the paper shimmers, exactly, but for what looked like a simple sheet of printer paper when Peter slid it out of the envelope, it feels like more than that. Like the paper their wedding invitations--no matter how few people they sent them out to, Walter included--felt, the high density speaking of something more than just a simple drawing on a paper. 

“Olivia?” Peter sounds concerned, so she looks up at him, then shakes her head as if to rid it of these odd notions. 

It’s never that simple though. She sets it down on the kitchen counter and it goes down with the slap of cheap, thin paper, not the cardstock her mind was somehow expecting. “Walter sent you this?” Peter nods. “There wasn’t a note or anything?” 

He holds the envelope open, upside-down, over the counter as a response. Olivia returns her gaze to the paper for a long moment, then smiles at Peter. 

He grins back, as is his nature. “What?”

“It’s just,” she shakes her head, the smile still playing around her lips. “One of the earliest memories I have of you,” she hesitates, a pause born of the scattered nature of her own memories. “Back in Jacksonville. The white tulips.”

It takes him a moment to recall, since even before timeline shenanigans happened he hadn’t exactly recalled that one moment out of the cacophony of trauma that was his dual childhood. But when he does, he smiles warmly at Olivia, at Olive, at his Olivia. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember.”

She wasn’t entirely sure herself. Even after all these years, sometimes the memories from the other timeline--the right timeline, she can’t help but think--come seeping through and seem like dreams. But she can recall this, sitting in a field, the adrenaline fading and this boy at her side, soft and still and shimmering. She didn’t know what the shimmer meant, then, so took it as a sign, though she did not know what of. 

Peter shakes her from intercessory memory with a chuckle, and opens the fridge. He emerges with the bottle of white wine that they hadn’t finished yesterday and a look in his eyes. Olivia abandons the paper to turn and retrieve her empty glass, and they spend the night with a nice pinot gris and each other. 

-

The lab is half ambered-over, the familiar shapes of equipment warped and distorted by the petrified chemical, though where Peter sits is fine. He hears a hum from further on, the sound of the laser (he isn’t sure how he knows that), but other than that it’s quiet. The girl--woman, really--sits before him, Walter beside her. He’s walking her through some process Peter can't hear the details of, though he recognizes the tone. It’s a tone Walter only ever used with a very few people. 

Suddenly there’s an inhale from Walter, a sharper gasp from the young woman, and a puff of steam from the… whatever-it-is in front of her. She laughs, covering her face with her hands in mixed astonishment and embarrassment. Walter… after a moment he chuckles too, laying a hand on her shoulder. “A noble effort, my dear. But the process _does_ matter, in this case.”

She composes herself, nodding firmly in a way that sets Peter’s heart alight, sets her hands flat down on the lab bench. “Okay. Okay! I’ve got it this time. This time for sure.”

Peter can’t think why, but he is so, so proud of her. And then he wakes to the dark of their bedroom in the suburbs.

-

She hears the retort, the same register as a car backfiring or a falling beam, but of course it’s a gunshot. What else could it be?

Peter hears it too, and she can only take a moment to register that he’s older and rougher and there’s something about him--but even in the dream the smell of blood registers. Blood and dust and the bitter bile of adrenaline and just before the dream can show her the thing she is most scared of seeing, Olivia bolts awake. 

Etta is there, eyes wide and shimmering in the little light that comes through the curtains. “Mama?”


	2. Grandeur in This View of Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life, and life, and more life--or is it? Or will it be? Olivia may have premonitory powers, but does Etta? Does Etta understand? Will the world slow down enough for anyone to actually deal with any of this shit? 
> 
> (The answers are yes, no, and hell no, respectively.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One shiny-fresh mental breakdown later, have a chapter!

When Olivia wakes next it is with her daughter's hair in her mouth and her husband's elbow in her back and if they aren't up five minutes ago Etta will probably be late for pre-school.

Not the first nor the last time such a thing has happened, and the simple normality of this little chaos carries all three of them through for the morning routine. Peter takes Etta, joking with Olivia out the door that they'll probably see each other next at the lab--and then all is quiet in the house for the moment.

It's easily filled, at first, the dishes from last night and the bed-clothes from the night before and the thousand other things that here build up a life lived without anomalies. Easily slotted away into cubbies and categories. Cleaned and categorized and contained.

And then her hand comes to rest on the paper on the counter, the flimsy white copy paper with the simple tulip drawing and she hesitates. 

\--There's the scrape of paper--metal--flesh--and a sharp intake of breath--

Then the ringing of a phone and she skims the paper away, tucked into a place where she won't forget it and there's a consultation and then there she is, in the office. It's only paperwork, and it's totally routine. She updates Peter via text and the picture he sends back of Etta is her making an utterly ridiculous face at another little girl at Pre-K and the thing is Olivia feels like this... this is exactly what she was missing. This is what she wanted for her daughter. For her to grow up as, for her--

She doesn't show Broyles _officially_ of course... but off the record there was never any question. Broyles is family. As much as Walter, Astrid, Nina--Olivia laughs at the implied query, the half-joke, shakes her head. "We haven't exactly given her the intro to chemistry set _quite_ yet", and nothing more is said of it. (They all know that Henrietta Bishop has known what an acid and a base is as soon as she could differentiate the words, but work is work is work and they afford them this polite fiction as a courtesy and a kindness.)

And so it goes, until Olivia is there at the preschool (thoroughly vetted--no odd extra-legal experiments here, no sir), waiting for Etta to appear in the doorway. Then there she is and Olivia is spinning her up in the air (her momentum was so fast this time) and then Etta says "You're here!"

It's the note of surprise that catches her off guard. Olivia slings Etta onto her hip, bopping her nose with her own, the rebound close, Etta's weight solid there. "Of course I'm here! Where else would I be?"

The catch and silence in her daughter's voice is not what she expects. The burr that catches in her own throat and heart isn't either.

But soon Etta is in the car seat and they are on they way home and there is Peter on the phone, his voice a comfort down to her bones. He's there and Etta's there, which means if everything is as it should be... then there should be a case and Olivia answers the car's phone interface to find out what it is. Peter's greeting, laugh, and a heartbeat later Etta crows in with "Papa!"

Olivia smiles. If Peter knows that Etta's there too, he won't get too graphic, and that they can work out, in words Etta won't understand. How to make sure she's safe and home and all their definitions of alright.

He mentions the lab and the physics experiments (safe--approved--unlikely to maim, if even that much) that are set up. He mentions the techs and equipment waiting in the field (the usual--possible anomaly, probably not life-threatening this time). Olivia throws a glance at her daughter in the car seat and smiles and takes that twinge she felt somewhere and buries it.

Harvard is perfectly normal, when she pulls up, slots the car into a place in a parking lot. Undergrad students rushing to and fro, graduates lingering at a more leisurely pace. _You can tell the freshmen_, she thinks, _by the way they run_, as she follows Etta into the lab.

Etta's full-tilt forward run always makes Olivia fear she's going to crash headlong into a stone column or solemn student or something else. Etta runs with none of the caution that the world or her parents or anything else should have imparted upon her, racing, as she does. Somehow she misses coeds and colleagues, thumping up the stone steps and then down again into the basement laboratory.

At the top of the stairs, Olivia breathes in and gets a lungful of dust. She coughs, once, twice, thrice. Etta looking back at her and then it's gone and Olivia smiles her reassurance at her daughter who runs ahead again--always ahead.

The doors bang and Astrid says hi and there is nothing from Walter and Olivia's stomach clenches. 

Astrid looks up and smiles at Etta and if Olivia has learned anything in these past... however many years that it has been with timelines changing and all--something is not quite right.

**Author's Note:**

> I have all the intentions in the world to continue my self-indulgent Fringe fic. But life comes at you fast, so we'll see.
> 
> Either way, thanks for coming this far.


End file.
